Over-reliance on customer feedback is hurting local retailers.
For the past few years I have been trying to unravel the mystery of why so many local retailers are reluctant to embrace new marketing technologies such as email marketing and e-commerce web sites. The explanations I get from various small business consultants and web gurus usually fall along the line of “they are resistant to change,” “they are stuck in the past,”...
Read MoreSocial media and email marketing compliment each other.
Back in October after reading a Wall Street Journal story about the demise of email, I asked the following: Is the growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter slowly killing off email as an effective marketing tool? “Death of email” articles like the one from the Journal assume that two methods of communication cannot coexist, each having a unique role to...
Read MoreSocial networks and gender segmentation.
Thanks to Joe Trippi’s blog, I found some interesting data about the gender composition of social networking sites. The research data and chart come from Royal Pingdom, which used site demographics data for the United States gathered from Google’s Ad Planner service. The study shows that many sites are heavily tilted towards one gender demographic or the other. A few, like LinkedIn and...
Read MoreSocial media experts sing if I had a hammer.
You LOVE hammers! You SELL hammers! You know in your gut that hammers are cool, hip, and can change the world if given something to bang. Everywhere you go you sell hammers. You want to sell me a hammer. You believe fervently, passionately that my situation would be vastly improved if I had a hammer. So you knuckle down, polish your pitch, and try over and over again to sell me a hammer. The...
Read MoreBreaking news: insulting your target market is not good strategy.
In our enthusiasm to convert prospects to our brand of marketing religion, there is a temptation to cross the dividing line between simply uncovering customer needs, an essential part of the marketing process, to implying that the prospect is being wrong-headed or just plain stupid by not seeing how badly they need what we are selling. If we’re not careful about the way we uncover needs and...
Read MoreEmail and social networking: can’t we all just get along?
We all know about Twitter and its phenomenal growth during the past year. Last night I read a post about Facebook’s share of social networking traffic jumping from 20% to 59%, leading the vast migration to social networking sites, or what I like to call the “Famous for 15 Minutes. . .Or Less” web sites. Then, today, comes this article from the Wall Street Journal about the...
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